Bizarre Things People Actually Believe About the Moon

What is the moon? It’s the Earth’s only natural satellite and was thought to have come about after something collided with the Earth several billion years ago. A constant presence in the night sky, and sometimes visible by day, it’s been a subject of veneration, celebration and study by humans since forever. This article is not going to talk about anything so contentious or well-trodden as the moon landings; rather we’re going to take a look at some other weird beliefs and hoaxes that have revolved around the moon, so to speak.

And get ready because there are some corkers in there.

The Moon is Made of Cheese

We now know that the moon is primarily made of rock and has an iron core but at some point you might have heard the expression that the moon is made of cheese or even green cheese. Where did this come from? To anyone looking up at night, it’s quite clear that the moon is not cheese. Cheese does not glow and it would have to be a freaking large and dense ball of the dairy stuff to have survived this long if that’s indeed what it is.

Actually, saying that, there is an incredibly hard cheese made in the Himalayas called “Chhurpi” so if the moon is made of any cheese, I’m going with that one. Seriously, it’s like chewing on a lump of wood.

There are several versions of a folktale floating around in which the moon is reflected in a pond or lake and a gullible fool, human or animal, thinks or is told that it’s a nice big cheese and he should dive down and get it. The simpleton usually drowns in the attempt, spends their entire life trying to pick the reflection up, or drinks the water to get to the cheese and bursts.

While it’s hard to pin down the origins for folktales, it seems that one of the earliest recorded examples of the phrase came in the sixteenth century, courtesy of the playwright, John Heywood. He wrote a book of “Proverbes” in 1546, which included a reference to the moon being made of green cheese as a way of saying someone was very gullible.

Ye fetch circumquaques to make me beleeve, Or thinke, that the moone is made of a greene cheese And when ye have made me a lout in all these, It seemeth ye would make me goe to bed at noone.

Also, a “green cheese” in these circumstances or “circumquaques” refers to a young cheese or one that hasn’t ripened yet, not one that’s actually green in colour. Which makes sense as the moon isn’t green.

Heywood also came up with, or at least recorded for the first time, many pithy epigrams and idioms that we still use today, such as “out of sight, out of mind”, “the more the merrier” and “this hitteth the nail on the head”, although we might have updated that one a bit. This moon cheese thing might not be at the top of our grab-bag of insults anymore, but the literal idea of a big lump of space cheese persists to this day with frequent cultural references to it in a myriad of cartoons and things like Wallace and Gromit’s “A Grand Day Out”. Even NASA got in on the joke, although it took them until 2002 to think of it. An image credited to their Ranger 9 spacecraft was photoshopped so you could see an expiration date printed inside one of the moon’s craters, which was April 1st, 2002. On their Astronomy Picture of the Day site, it then added underneath “Controversy still exists, however, over whether the date resolved is truly an expiration date or just a ‘sell by’ date. ‘To be cautious, we should completely devour the Moon by tomorrow,’ a spokesperson advised.” Well played, NASA, well played.

The Many Inhabitants of the Moon

What lives on the moon? Tardigrades, potentially, although scientists now say they probably didn’t survive a crash landing on the moon in 2019. So what else do we know of that lives there? The man in the moon?

That boy with the fishing rod from the Dreamworks logo? Some bipedal beavers? Wait, beavers? Yes, this is an example of something that some people actually believed in the nineteenth century—that there were, amongst other things, beavers and bat-people living on the moon.

But even before that there was speculation that things lived on the rocky satellite.

After the invention of telescopes that meant people could see the moon in greater detail, imaginations started to run wild. In 1638, a book by Bishop John Wilkins was published called “The Discovery of a World in the Moone” which sounds like he actually discovered something but the subtitle goes on to say: “or A Discourse Tending to Prove That Tis Probable There May be Another Habitable World to That Planet”. Oh, OK John, so this is just a theory and, by the way, the moon isn’t even a planet.

Moving on, in 1835, the ironically named New York Sun newspaper published a series of articles detailing the findings of renowned astronomer, John Herschel. John Herschel was the son of William Herschel, also a famed astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus, amongst many other things, and who had also had a theory that the moon might be populated. This theory was not one of his correct ones.

Anyway, going back to John Herschel, the New York Sun declared to the world via a Dr. Andrew Grant, who was a research assistant of Herschel’s, that Herschel had made incredible observations of the moon from his time spent researching on the Cape of Good Hope. And boy, did Herschel seem to have a good telescope. In fact, according to the original article, it was calculated as having a magnifying power of 42,000 times. I got a bit confused trying to compare it with modern-day telescopes, as they are massive and can use more than one lens so the magnification is calculated per inch of aperture. I think we can safely say that it was way better than other telescopes in 1835 though.

Here are some of the things he apparently saw through it and that were published in the paper under the headline “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel”. As well as finding areas of the moon that were lush valleys filled with colourful trees, Herschel also quickly spotted various life forms. The first was similar to a small Earth bison but had “a remarkable fleshy appendage over the eyes, crossing the whole breadth of the forehead and united to the ears.” This could be lifted and lowered and Herschel came to the conclusion that the animals could use it as some sort of visor to protect their eyes from the light.

The next animal discovered was a kind of unicorn-goat mix, described as “a bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular.” Many other birds and animals are discovered over the course of the 6 article run, including miniature zebras, a long-necked sheep with two horns, and the beaver we mentioned at the start. The description given is: “The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion.”

Unsurprisingly, the public was eating this up. Circulation of the New York Sun boomed and it became the most widely read newspaper in the world which, according to the JSTOR website, meant it had a circulation of a whopping 19,360 copies. It was 1835, remember. The articles were scientific in nature, beginning with a very long and dry description of how the telescope was designed etc. so it’s quite surprising that people even read far enough to get to the blue unicorn goat parts. Herschel is constantly named in the articles and supposed direct quotes from him are printed, giving it more than a sheen of credibility even though, in reality, he didn’t have anything to do with it.

The articles were accompanied by vivid illustrations of the landscape and creatures found, again, naming Herschel who was very well-known at this point in time, and adding fuel to the fire of the public’s imagination. The stars of the show, though, turned out to be the bat-people. They were found near a lake which, according to the article “displays scenery on both sides picturesque and romantic beyond the powers of prose description.”

These bat-beings “averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs”. The article then goes on to describe their social interactions and fruit-eating activities in some detail.

The New York Sun never admitted that this was anything other than a series of scientific articles, however it was a tabloid style paper at the time and the whole affair has since become known as “The Great Moon Hoax”. Herschel himself reportedly found the whole thing funny at first, saying that he wished his discoveries could be that interesting, but as time went on he got pretty fed up with it as people kept asking him if it was true. The supposed author of the articles, Dr. Andrew Grant, was not real and was actually a cover for one of the paper’s own writers, Richard Locke. He said that the whole thing was meant to be satirical but that’s not how it was received by the public at the time who must have been pretty disappointed when they eventually found out the whole thing was a joke. Or maybe they didn’t find out in their lifetimes, as in the early nineteenth century many people and scientists were very open to believing that there were full-on societies on other planets, so they died believing in blue unicorns living in the rainbow valley on the moon.

The Nazi Moon Base

What happened to Hitler and his wife Eva Braun when they realised the writing was on the wall in April 1945? Contrary to popular belief, they did not kill themselves by gunshot and cyanide respectively, they instead hopped into a spaceship and flew off to an established bunker on the moon which the Germans had been using since at least 1942. Soviet troops closing in on a German rocket base towards the end of the war apparently witnessed several huge rockets lifting off. They were much larger than the normal V-2 ballistic rocket, and traces of them were never found again, leaving generals to ponder what or who might have been aboard.

While the idea of Hitler hot-footing it to the moon or Nazis having some sort of base up there seems laughable, the Germans were probably capable at the time of creating a rocket that could make it to space. In fact, a test firing of a V2 rocket did make it over the NASA-defined “start of space” line in 1942 which is 50 miles or 80.5km above sea level. This is lower than other imaginary space boundaries but NASA is quite well-known so I thought this probably counted. The Nazis were more interested in perfecting their rockets as weapons at the time, though, so weren’t particularly bothered about space exploration.

The moon base idea has stuck around in popular culture, with video games especially making use of the “Nazis on the moon” trope. In 2012, a movie, spin-off video game and board game called “Iron Sky” were released. Currently 5.9 on IMDb (which is below my “voluntary watch” threshold of 6.7), it’s apparently a tongue-in-cheek movie about Nazis who have been living on the dark side of the moon since 1945 and now want to re-invade the Earth. Here’s a quote from Leslie Felperin who reviewed the film for Variety: “Ultimately, ‘Iron Sky’ is neither good enough to rep a proper breakout hit nor bad enough that it might attain cult status; it’s just kind of lame, the worst of all possible worlds.” Ouch. It did spawn a sequel in 2019 so it can’t have done that badly.

As fantastic and silly as all this sounds, though, there really are Nazis on the moon. What? Explain please! OK, here’s what I mean.

There are lunar craters named after Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus (pronounced DAY-boos), both of whom were card-carrying Nazi party and SS members before jumping ship to work in America after the end of the Second World War. Von Braun, of course, was one of the main developers of the German’s V-2 rocket and later worked on the Saturn V rocket that led the USA to land on the moon. Debus was a weapons flight test director for the Nazis and then worked with von Braun again on other US rocket projects.

He also ended up becoming the first director of the Kennedy Space Center when it was set up in 1963.

Sure, they said afterwards that they had to join the parties as it would be dangerous not to and they didn’t believe in Hitler’s ideologies blah blah blah but of course you’re going to play down your involvement in one of the most contentious political parties of all time when the opportunity of a clean slate and a well-paid dream job comes your way. Many other “former” Nazi engineers and scientists were brought over to the US under a secret mission called Operation Paperclip to give the US a boost against the Soviets in the Space Race and Cold War. So yeah, while there might not be a secret Nazi military base on the moon, lots of former Nazi party members were highly instrumental in developing many aspects of current space technology.

The Hollow Moon

Have you heard of the Hollow Earth theory? This idea has been floating around for hundreds of years and posits that the Earth is actually hollow and there’s basically a whole other land in there. This is represented in the world of entertainment all the time with things like Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” from 1864 all the way up to Godzilla vs Kong in 2021. Anyway, imagine that sort of thing, but for the moon.

OK, I can see why people might have thought it was hollow in the dim and distant past or that, you know, there were blue goats on it or whatever, but this theory persisted well into the twentieth century and probably is still around now. But why would anyone think that the moon was hollow anyway? In 1969, the Apollo 12 space mission deliberately crashed part of the rocket that was no longer necessary into the moon to measure seismic effects.

The information was picked up by seismometers that were actually installed on the moon and the results were beamed back to NASA. NASA reported at one point that the moon “rang like a bell for almost an hour” after the collision. This led people, although not everyone at NASA, presumably, to believe that the moon must therefore be hollow to produce such an effect, or at least have large hollow pockets in its interior.

It’s since been shown in various experiments that as the moon is less dense than the Earth, and because of its physical make-up, quakes on the moon just create different effects to those on our planet. There is no real evidence pointing to a big space or spaces in the middle of the moon and really, if we find out in the future that it is hollow, so what? Scientists can just use that information to work out other things about space and planet formations.

It would hardly be a black eye for the science world, more of an unexpected revelation. Anyway, that’s my armchair take on it, not having nailed my scientific credentials to the mast of “the moon has to be solid and anyone who thinks otherwise is a complete idiot!” I suppose NASA will be accused of lying to the world but they can just say they were going on the best information they had at the time and are now excited by this new finding.

That’s what I would say, anyway.

Moving on, as we have not drilled down to the centre of the moon or taken an x-ray of the whole thing, we can’t say for sure whether it’s hollow or not, but as the general scientific consensus seems to be that it isn’t, the whole “hollow moon” theory seems a bit weird and pointless. But where most people see a totally pointless fringe theory, others smell a cover-up. The hollow moon theory is also known as the “spaceship moon” theory which goes off on the tangent that the moon is hollow because of aliens or that there’s an alien spacecraft hidden inside it or that the moon itself is an alien spacecraft.

According to some Russian scientists, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, there is no way the moon’s craters are natural. If the bigger craters were made by large meteors, they would be a lot deeper and not have such flat bottoms. Therefore, the rocks must be hitting some sort of armoured plating just under the moon’s surface. And therefore, it’s a spaceship that was created by aliens.

Woo hoo, conspiracy theories ahoy! It would be amazing if we did find this to be true although if the spacecraft ever took off it would probably wreak havoc on our planet and we’d all be underwater in a matter of minutes so let’s hope that never happens. The spaceship moon hypotheses ties into the last wild idea which is that…the moon is a hologram.

The Moon is a Hologram

You know the moon, right? That white shiny thing in the sky that waxes and wanes, affects the planet’s oceans and that multiple people have actually set foot on? Yeah, that moon isn’t real. It’s a hologram, we’re living in a hologram, everything is one big hologram. Please unwrap a new roll of tinfoil cos you’re going to be making many, many hats for this one. I’m talking David Icke territory here.

First off, why would people think that the moon is a hologram or anything other than a big lump of rock floating about in space? Backyard astronomers have apparently witnessed “glitches” in the appearance of the moon or decided that it’s actually transparent, which can in no way be related to issues with their equipment or their existing beliefs. I’m being sarcastic in case you didn’t realise.

I’ve found other people saying things like the US government is projecting a hologram of the moon to cover for the fact that they spent so much money on the purported Apollo missions but were really using it for other, top secret, things and the moon never existed in the first place. I’ve seen theories that the moon is real but a hologram is being projected over it to hide what’s really going on up there. Like, Nazi military bases being built?

Aliens doing things that us poor sheep aren’t supposed to know about? I don’t know. The people who believe that the Earth is flat have differing opinions on the moon, including that it is flat, that it’s tiny and that it’s fake so at least they have options to fall back on if they ever realise the Earth really is round.

So what does former Coventry City goalkeeper, David Icke, have to say on these moonly matters? The granddaddy of conspiracy stories actually had two ideas about the moon, both of which just occurred to him one day, you know, as they do, so instead of, I don’t know, doing some research into it or discussing it with astronomers, or maybe seeing a psychiatrist, he just plopped them into books, therefore validating them as real things to whomsoever reads and believes his stuff.

His original theory was that the moon is an alien vessel and is sending false realities directly into our brains. He then expanded on this in another book which went on to say that the moon is an artificial construct, amplifying a signal from Saturn’s rings set up by his favourite lizard people, which projects a false hologram onto the earth, and we’re all blindly living inside it. To which I say, big whoop. I’m having an alright time down here and if I have to one day get pulled out of a pod Matrix-style and have to fend for myself in the “real world”, I probably wouldn’t last very long although at least I’d get an artfully ripped fisherman’s jumper and some pretty cool boots.

If the aliens are running this planet for their own amusement, my little sim is doing fine as long as books, coffee and Netflix exist. Don’t ruin life for me, Mr. Icke!

On a side note, looking for his website which is David Icke.com, I genuinely read it as “Davi Dick E” which is kind of unfortunate for him but I suppose it’s a bit late in the day to change the brand name now. So rather than being a hologram itself, the moon is actually a hologram projector. If it is, wow, it’s doing a great job. I suppose I’m just falling for the cover-up but I’ve been led to believe that holograms generally look a bit shit. Currently I’m inside a projected house, on a projected chair, typing on a projected laptop that’s resting on a projected table and it all looks really real and solid and everything! And that’s just me. There are several billion other people blithely doing things with projections, 99.9% of which are totally pointless in the grand scheme of things. That’s a lot of work going into keeping the human race under the impression that things are as they seem. And to what end? According to Icke, it’s to stop us from realising our full potential in which case I guess we’d overthrow the aliens and take over the universe for ourselves but even if that happened, I’m still just going to be one of the normal people chugging along somewhere in the middle. Icke makes many references to The Matrix films in his statements which makes you wonder if he was maybe influenced by them in later years. If he was, I hope he didn’t watch the newest one because it was kind of hard to keep a handle on.

So is the moon hollow, an alien ship, a dragon egg like in an episode of Doctor Who or just a chunk of rock flying about in space? As usual, the most mundane answer is usually the correct one but since when has that stopped humans making up their own wacky ideas? Let’s end with a quotation by Chinese American Taoist, Deng Ming-Dao: “The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.” Not bad for a hologram.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the moon primarily made of?

The moon is primarily made of rock and has an iron core.

What is the origin of the phrase ‘the moon is made of green cheese’?

The phrase originated in the sixteenth century from a book of proverbs by John Heywood, used to describe someone as gullible.

What was the Great Moon Hoax?

The Great Moon Hoax was a series of articles published in the New York Sun in 1835, detailing fictional discoveries of various life forms on the moon, including beavers and bat-people.

What is the Nazi Moon Base theory?

The Nazi Moon Base theory suggests that Hitler and his wife Eva Braun escaped to a moon base established by the Germans during World War II.

What evidence led some to believe the moon is hollow?

The Apollo 12 mission’s seismic data, which showed the moon ‘rang like a bell’ for nearly an hour after a rocket impact, led some to believe the moon might be hollow.

What is the ‘spaceship moon’ theory?

The ‘spaceship moon’ theory proposes that the moon is hollow because it is an alien spacecraft or contains one, based on the idea that lunar craters are not natural.

What does David Icke believe about the moon?

David Icke believes the moon is an alien vessel or an artificial construct projecting a false hologram onto Earth, controlled by lizard people from Saturn’s rings.

What is the Hollow Moon theory?

The Hollow Moon theory suggests that the moon is hollow or has large hollow pockets inside, based on seismic data from the Apollo 12 mission.

What is the Moon Hologram theory?

The Moon Hologram theory posits that the moon is a hologram projected by the US government or aliens to hide the truth about what is really happening on or around the moon.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Bizarre Things People Actually Believe About the Moon
• Hero image source by Vyacheslav Argenberg / openverse, by.